I'm starting a typeface with a neon light effect in FontLab Studio 6. It's something I've done before with
Ampacity and
Electric. When I made those fonts, I wasted a lot of time manually cleaning up the mangled vector mess that FontLab's stroke tool created. Is there anything I can do to make this better besides expanding strokes in Illustrator or not using FontLab? Is there a trick to it? I'm certain every other font tool can do this properly but I'm in Windows so I pretty much have to use FontLab for this project. Was it really this bad in Fontographer?
- The original stroke at about 800 units: not an actual letter, just a test scribble with some RMX Harmonize
- 40 stroke with rounded ends (barf)
- Scaled 500%, stroked and scaled back down (yuck)
- 20 stroke with rounded ends (stop it)
Comments
Launch it in your browser (No OS dependency, no installation)
Set the Outline width to 10 units.
With this curves complexity you can ignore the SX system, and draw each glyph independently.
For each node on the original path (skeleton) Fontark's outline generation algo will produce one node on the inside and one node on the outside of the contour.
Generate an otf file and download it.
And you can apply the effect on export, that means you can keep the center stroke. I know that you might like to refine some details here and there, but it will at least speed up the design phase a lot as you can get from centreline to finished font (to preview in Indesign) in a few seconds. And you can add several instances with different stroke widths. more details: https://www.glyphsapp.com/tutorials/monoline
As I see it FontArk results are superb - wonderful piece of software, but working in - browser is not my glass of beer and I don't favor the GUI also... nevertheless Ofir's implementation and engine is wonderful (congrats!) .
In any case, I've filed a bug on this for VI, # 872.
Thomas: the only problem I got with Expand Contour is the lack of extrema in rounded start/end caps, as you can see at the end of the video. The result seems just a bit inferior to Noodler plugin for Glyphs.
Thanks for all your helpful advice, everyone.
Yeah, it's probably better to do that and attach circles to the open ends manually. I'm aiming for something I can use for masters and I want precise control how those ends are constructed and I want precise twist overlaps on acute angles.
@Vassil Kateliev
What's MetaStroke?
Procedure:
1. Draw skeletal path
2. Copy path
3. <Expand Path> value 20, roundness 100.
4. Paste in Mask layer (Command M)
5. Clear outline layer
6. Paste skeletal path
7. <Make Parallel Path> value 10 each side; “Remove the original” “[open contour]”
8. In the Mask layer, individually select the round ends, cut, snap and paste into position in the Outline layer
It was a FontLab to METAPOST+ to FontLab stroking/calligraphy MM masters producing engine that I developed as a proof-of-concept for my doctorate thesis. It was designed to create super clean contours, on multiple nib/pen settings, but always keeping the same node count and construct identical masters with different weights/widths for interpolation... I presume exactly what you are asking/willing to do with your design right now...
It is defunct now and very badly written (I knew very little python back then), but working 4 years ago. It needs to be rewritten from the ground up, but I do not have the time to invest in this particular project. Last night I patched it just so it could work for this particular example. When I finish rewriting the code it will be available for free (as all uni/thesis stuff usually is), but i presume FL5 will be defunct by then....
Oh right, I remember now: very cool.
@Nick Shinn
Great idea!
... just out of curiosity, why bother with haskell and beziers/vector/font stuff... do you have something in mind, or just for pleasure? I am also really interested in how haskell deals with pattern recognition, have you considered trying to implement some sort of character anatomy recognition, for example... find all vertical stems in vector shapes and etc.